


On Ordeal: Adrien

by chatbug



Series: A Wizard Miraculous [2]
Category: Miraculous Ladybug, Young Wizards - Diane Duane
Genre: Gen, Past Character Death, but it's fun to write, but that's in the canon, coming up with ideas for ordeals is really hard, in fact it's the opposite, there isn't a norm for them, this was a pain
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-25
Updated: 2017-11-25
Packaged: 2019-02-06 17:11:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,533
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12822192
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chatbug/pseuds/chatbug
Summary: Adrien's Ordeal hit soon after his mother disappeared, and he misses her, and wants to bring her back. With magic it looks like it should be a simple job, but is it really?





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I was not expecting how hard it would be to write an ordeal for a character, even one that I've developed a lot in my head. Everything has a meaning, and has to go back to his core values, and wants. This would not have been possible to write without having my friends to endlessly talk at about it (even though they knew nothing about the fandoms) so thank you!  
> I took the idea from what was described as a "hell journey" in 'Games Wizards Play', which was Penn's ordeal, something he never wanted to talk about again.

I came home from my photoshoot and flopped down onto my couch. The shoot had gone over by 2 hours and the designer still wasn't happy when I left. The clothes had been itchy and the makeup had been heavy.

I wish Mother was here. She had always stood up to Father when he was sending me to photoshoots that were going to be too long, and she was the one that let me be a kid. She always got me whatever books or games I wanted, and when I got into anime and manga I could always talk to her, even though she didn't understand most of what I was talking about.

It's been bad since she disappeared. Father's been more distant, and he's been keeping me in the house, scrapping Mother's plan to send me to _college_ with the other students my age.

I got up and went to my desk, where a new tablet was sitting next to my keyboard. I picked it up, figuring that maybe Nathalie got it for me to help with my studies. I turned it over to the back to see if there was a note, to see that the logo was different from the one I had expected. The logo's apple was missing the bite out of it. It looked sleek. I powered it up and it gave me a block of text in the middle of the screen with a little header that read "Wizard's Oath". It read;

_In Life’s name and for Life’s sake,_

_I assert that I will employ the Art which is its gift in Life’s service alone, rejecting all other usages._

_I will guard growth and ease pain. I will fight to preserve what grows and lives well in its own way; and I will change no object or creature unless its growth and life, or that of the system of which it is part, are threatened._

_To these ends, in the practice of my Art, I will put aside fear for courage, and death for life, when it is right to do so —_

_till Universe’s end._

I read it over a couple times, then I realized that I was being offered magic,and the chance to help people. I pressed the "OK" button that appeared under the block of text and the tablet booted to a normal home screen. It held the normal system apps, and one that was labeled "Manual" with a little book icon on it. I clicked on it and it popped up a bunch of information, things I never would have even thought about, much less thought existed, and a lot of it was in a language I had never seen. I fell back into my chair and started reading, not getting up for hours except to go to dinner.

That night the one thing I kept coming back to me was the idea of Timeheart, the place where everything that is loved stays alive forever. I'd been doing a lot of research on how to get there and if anyone can be brought back from there, but the manual app had no answer. Apparently visiting Timeheart wasn't that hard, but no-one had ever brought anyone or anything back from it, as the matter there is different from the matter in our universe.

There were many ways that one could cross between dimensions, to places that might be almost like our own universe, or to places where the laws of physics might not even be the same. I’d been reading into dimensional theory because I figured that maybe there could be a way to bring something through from Timeheart through one of them.

I fell asleep that night hopeful.

* * *

 

I spend the next couple days researching and gathering materials for what I was going to do. Nothing was too weird, luckily. If I had ordered something like eye of newt over Amazon, that might have raised a few questions from my father. I did have to sneak out though, to get one of the things I needed. The only place I could think of to find a vein of pure iron was out in the woods. I snuck out through a backdoor that no one ever uses anymore, and out into the deep woods that resided beyond the garden.

I went in until I found the quarry wall that I knew I could get to, and the whole time I was walking I listened to the world around me. Something that the manual highlighted on several times is that everything, be it sentient or not, understands the speech, and that everything has a story to tell. I could hear the rustling of the leaves above my head, the trees settling down at the end of summer, how they were thinking about putting out their fruits and settling in to go to sleep.

I got to the quarry wall and I was astounded by how tall, and how old it was. It had been a gypsum quarry, but it had been abandoned about 50 years ago when the Agreste family had bought the land. I’d seen it a bunch of times, whenever I snuck out to be by myself when I was a kid I would end up here, but this time I could almost hear what it was saying.

I walked up to it and put my hand on the cool rock.

 _Is something wrong?_ The wall asked and I jumped. _You always seem to be hurt when you come out to me._

“I’m fine.” I said, surprised that the rock responded. “Better than fine. I’m working on something that might be able to bring my mother back.”

 _So you need iron?_ The wall said, sounding happy. _Don’t worry, I’m used to the request. I’m just happy you’re doing something besides moping._

I pouted as I watched the wall shove a sliver of metal out of itself, like something rising through jello. The metal fell to the ground as a bumpy metal rod that was about the length of my forearm, and the width was roughly the same as a pen. I picked it up off the ground, and I put my hand back on the wall.

“Thank you.”

* * *

 

I put everything I thought I would need into my messenger bag, then I moved all the furniture to the edges of the room and laid out the spell I was planning on using. I found in while reading about parallel universes in the manual, and I bumped into some of the more recently created spells. It took the description of the thing you wanted to find and basically threw you to wherever that thing was, and gave you a 200 meter radius for where it was specifically.

I looked around my room. Everything was going to be different when I got back. Mom would be here, and the house would be bright again. It would be just like it was before.

The object that I was using to track her was her favorite hair scrunchie, I’d found it a couple days after she disappeared, and I’d kept it in a special place on top of my bureau ever since. I put in in one of the circles, which flared up to show that it accepted the scrunchie, then I moved to check my name. Everything seemed okay, so I went to stand in the middle of the spell.

I started to read the words that made the circles, and the world around me drew quiet, listening to what I was asking of it. And then I vanished, not noticing my father peeking into my room just as I left.

I appeared on what looked like a normal street in Paris, standing in front of the Arc de Triomphe, my mom's favorite landmark. There were people pushing around me trying to get to wherever they needed to go and seemingly not caring about a teenage boy appearing in their midst. I took my tablet out of my pocket, and looked at the arrow it showed on its screen that pointed to my mother.

I followed it through the crowds to an office building about a block down the street that looked like the old Agreste company headquarters. The one from before I was born.

I jumped back as two people pushed their way through the revolving doors and came out onto the sidewalk in front of me. My parents. But they looked much younger than I remember them, they might have been in their 20s, but they weren’t older than that. They were talking and joking as they walked down the street and into a nearby cafe. I stood there for a couple minutes, shocked that the spell had worked and brought me to my mother, though this looks like it sent me back in time to do so. This can’t be Timeheart if my father is here too, he isn’t dead.

I sat down on a bench and discreetly pulled up the manual on my tablet, paging to the spell I had used to get here. It said that to bring you to the object you desired it could pull you through to other universes, and it could land the wizard _in a version of his own universe just a few universes closer to Timeheart._

The spell had landed me in a universe that was running a little behind my home, where my mother hadn't disappeared yet. But there was no way I could bring her back from here. She wasn't in some version of an afterlife, but instead she has a life in this reality. I can't make her disappear on someone else.

I slouched down on the bench, thinking of calling it quits when I saw a car speeding down the street, and then it jumped the curb and headed straight for me. I lunged out of the way just in time and face planted on the sidewalk. The driver got out of the car, apologizing and saying that he had no control over his car. As he was talking I saw a man slip around the edge of one of the buildings, away from the commotion. For some reason he gave me a bad vibe.

Gabriel and Adele ran towards me and helped me to my feet, having seen the accident from the cafe. They ushered me up to their office to rest.

“You're so young, is there anyone I could call to pick you up?” Adele fussed, getting me a snack from the stash in her desk. “I know you seem calm right now, but you just almost got hit by a car. You should be with your parents.”

“My father isn’t around.” I said, trying not to lie. Lies just give the Lone One more power. “I can’t be with him right now.” Adele leaned down to hug me.

“You're welcome to stay with us until they get back.” Adele offered. “I hate parents who leave their children alone. This is just an example of what could happen!” I shot Gabriel a look and wondered, not for the first time, why my mother married him.

Adele kept fussing over me, and I became both happier and more depressed as the minutes stretched on. It was hard to be so close to her, and knowing at the same time that I was just going to have to say goodbye again.

I pushed myself away from her, and stood up. “I promised my father that I wouldn't stay out late.” I said, grimacing. It wasn't technically wrong.

“You're welcome to come in whenever you need.” Adele said, then she elbowed Gabriel to nod, as he had been working on something on a manakin.

I walked downstairs and out onto the street, where I bumped into the creep I'd seen earlier. I looked up to his face to say sorry, and instead took a step back. His face had a timeless quality to it, like an angel's, or a demon's.

“What's wrong little wizard?” The Lone Power asked. “Did you not find what you wanted?”

“No, and you know that.” I huffed, and I pushed past him to find an alley or something so that I could go back home. He followed me, and I turned around and stared him in the face. “You knew what I wanted and you turned it back in my face to spite me. I'm not going to fall for your tricks.”

"Everyone says that." The Lone Power said, smirking. "But in the end there's always something that they want, and then I can creep in."

"Creep is right." I said, leaning against the wall of the alleyway and pulling up the manual on my tablet to find some gating to get me back home. The Lone Power stalked after me, and glowered.

"You're aware that I'm a being that exists outside time, and that against me you aren't even a speck of dust, right?" He asked, and I shrugged.

"Yeah," I said. "But there are endless accounts of wizards besting you in infinitely different ways, in every time period and almost every part of this universe, so I know that you aren't perfect, you're just like me in that way."

"And you lost today." He said. "You can't say that you won when you can't bring your mother back, even if you knew deep down that it was the truth the whole time."

"But so did you." I retorted, throwing the spell circle onto the ground. "Now shove off. I'm sick and tired of listening to you." He gave me a look and slouched away, and I started reading the spell.

* * *

 

I got home in the evening, and I thought that everything was going to be fine, short of the fact that I came back without my mother. Well, that bubble burst quickly. I looked over to my door to see Nathalie knocking on it, and I ran over to open it.

"I'm glad you've found your way back home after _three days_ Adrien." She said, not looking up from her tablet. "Your father wants to see you in the dining room."


	2. What Gabriel Saw

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A little short of what Gabriel saw when Adrien dissapeared

Gabriel peeked into his son’s room when he heard a low murmur coming from it. It sounded like someone was working in the speech, but there was no way that Adrien could ever be a wizard. He opened the door just as he heard the pop of air rushing into a place an object had been in before, and Adrien was no-where to be seen.

He slowly backed out of the room, and put his back against the wall of the hallway. As far as he knew, he was a popup wizard, no-one else in his family had ever had any kind of power or oddity, and he himself had stopped doing much wizard work when his fashion empire had taken off.

He decided that there was nothing he could do until his son came back, and then he was going to make sure that he never left the house, and he never got into any trouble with the Lone Power. There was no way he was going to let anything happen to Adrien.


End file.
